Editor review

*** Update April 2013 *** We went through the sign up process again for a new site. It was just as easy as before if not a little easier. Since our first test site we have been running one of our newer websites on SiteGround which is getting around 30-40 pageviews a day. The site has around 100 pages on it with a bunch of new content using Joomla and K2. With all of our performance plugins and CDN we are getting around .7 page load time (this does not include images) for the past 2 months or so. In the past month we have had 99.98% uptime. Speed has not been an issue, and everything seems to be running smooth. Check back soon for more updates! ******

Sign up: Signing up with SiteGround was quick and painless. The registration is a single page. Once finished, we were ready to set up our new website.

Post sign up, we received our account information via Email. They called to ensure we had a good transaction and asked if they could assist any further.

Since we already had a domain registered somewhere else, we were able to point the DNS servers to the SiteGround. We have done this hundreds of times, but not everyone has. If you need help, call tech support and they will walk you through it.

Installing Joomla: After setting up the account and logging into the site we navigated through cPanel to set up Joomla. We created the databases using MySQL Databases and installed Joomla using the File Manager.

If you are not technically inclined you can use Softaculous. It is a one-click installer program that installs applications like Joomla for you.

Running Joomla: We set up our Joomla site right away and immediately logged in and started playing around. Joomla pages loaded fast and it was plenty responsive to keep us productively moving through the backend. The front end performs just as well.

Some caveats of using SiteGround are certainly the access to free templates. They are created by premium template designers like JoomlaShine.

Control Panel: Using SiteGround's control panel (cPanel) is easy because it is an industry standard. It comes with all of the standard features like PHP, Databases and domain managers. If you're not used to it, don't worry, you will get used to it and it's worth knowing your way around.

Speed & Uptime: Our website hosted at SiteGround couldn't be better. We published around 10,000 words on the front of the default Joomla template for the test. We then added the domain to our Pingdom account to monitor the speed and uptime. After 6 moths, it has remained very steady.

At it's slowest it was around 800ms and at it's fastest around 300ms. The average response time (speed) of the site was 532ms.

Uptime was very stable. It was 99.97% over the entire 6 Months.

Our experience with how the site has been hosted in terms of speed and uptime has been great. No complaints here. We will continue to see if the performance stays at a high level.

Support: Support is exactly how it should be. You call and they answer. We called in with a test question to see if they could answer it. the question was, "how can I uninstall Joomla?" The technician gave us one of several answers we were expecting in a timely manner without asking us to hold or sending us to another technician. A+ in our book.

Conclusion SiteGround has a fast, reliable and affordable service with plenty to offer. After our website test and experience with technical support we can say that we will continue to host some of our sites with them.

To us their best feature is their performance. The site handles very well for a shared server plan. Using Joomla (and other CMS's) works like a charm.

Their worst feature is their cluttered help desk. It has A LOT of information which is hard to sort through. It's not terrible, but if you plan to do a lot of troubleshooting check out the help desk and see what you think.

Overall we are comfortable recommending SiteGround to people looking for a good web host. They did a good job for us, so they will do one for you as well.

Make sure to share this review and leave one of your own. It's important to us that we keep this review up to date and relevant. Let us know if you have any questions or issues! Thanks!

Awesome Speed & Uptime Plus Great Customer Service

Overview

We have ranked SiteGround highly because they have excellent speed and reliability, they are easy to use, tech support is top notch, and their prices are very competitive.

SiteGround has many different plan options. For this review we used their basic shared hosting plan which most website owners will use. It costs $6.95 and comes with unlimited hosting space and traffic, many emailing tools, access to cPanel, and 24/7 technical support.

After hosting with them for several months, our site has performed awesomely. We were a bit hesitant at first based on some reviews that made SiteGround sound hard to use and unreliable. After 6 months of monitoring, we can say they have exceeded our expectations.

Some parts of the help desk are tough to sort through. That is because there are so many guides and tutorials, they have a system that is designed to help you find the best answer to your question. This can be a little convoluted, and it's easier to pick up the phone and call. Otherwise we are very satisfied with the service.

Pros and Cons

Full Review

*** Update April 2013 *** We went through the sign up process again for a new site. It was just as easy as before if not a little easier. Since our first test site we have been running one of our newer websites on SiteGround which is getting around 30-40 pageviews a day. The site has around 100 pages on it with a bunch of new content using Joomla and K2. With all of our performance plugins and CDN we are getting around .7 page load time (this does not include images) for the past 2 months or so. In the past month we have had 99.98% uptime. Speed has not been an issue, and everything seems to be running smooth. Check back soon for more updates! ******

Sign up: Signing up with SiteGround was quick and painless. The registration is a single page. Once finished, we were ready to set up our new website.

Post sign up, we received our account information via Email. They called to ensure we had a good transaction and asked if they could assist any further.

Since we already had a domain registered somewhere else, we were able to point the DNS servers to the SiteGround. We have done this hundreds of times, but not everyone has. If you need help, call tech support and they will walk you through it.

Installing Joomla: After setting up the account and logging into the site we navigated through cPanel to set up Joomla. We created the databases using MySQL Databases and installed Joomla using the File Manager.

If you are not technically inclined you can use Softaculous. It is a one-click installer program that installs applications like Joomla for you.

Running Joomla: We set up our Joomla site right away and immediately logged in and started playing around. Joomla pages loaded fast and it was plenty responsive to keep us productively moving through the backend. The front end performs just as well.

Some caveats of using SiteGround are certainly the access to free templates. They are created by premium template designers like JoomlaShine.

Control Panel: Using SiteGround's control panel (cPanel) is easy because it is an industry standard. It comes with all of the standard features like PHP, Databases and domain managers. If you're not used to it, don't worry, you will get used to it and it's worth knowing your way around.

Speed & Uptime: Our website hosted at SiteGround couldn't be better. We published around 10,000 words on the front of the default Joomla template for the test. We then added the domain to our Pingdom account to monitor the speed and uptime. After 6 moths, it has remained very steady.

At it's slowest it was around 800ms and at it's fastest around 300ms. The average response time (speed) of the site was 532ms.

Uptime was very stable. It was 99.97% over the entire 6 Months.

Our experience with how the site has been hosted in terms of speed and uptime has been great. No complaints here. We will continue to see if the performance stays at a high level.

Support: Support is exactly how it should be. You call and they answer. We called in with a test question to see if they could answer it. the question was, "how can I uninstall Joomla?" The technician gave us one of several answers we were expecting in a timely manner without asking us to hold or sending us to another technician. A+ in our book.

Conclusion SiteGround has a fast, reliable and affordable service with plenty to offer. After our website test and experience with technical support we can say that we will continue to host some of our sites with them.

To us their best feature is their performance. The site handles very well for a shared server plan. Using Joomla (and other CMS's) works like a charm.

Their worst feature is their cluttered help desk. It has A LOT of information which is hard to sort through. It's not terrible, but if you plan to do a lot of troubleshooting check out the help desk and see what you think.

Overall we are comfortable recommending SiteGround to people looking for a good web host. They did a good job for us, so they will do one for you as well.

Make sure to share this review and leave one of your own. It's important to us that we keep this review up to date and relevant. Let us know if you have any questions or issues! Thanks!

Outstanding service

Overview

I have been with Siteground for only a short while now, and they have blown me away! Really great service, great prices, and the support is professional and helpful. I was with Rochen before I switched to Siteground, and what a welcome relief. No arrogant unhelpful support replies! YAY!

Pros and Cons

Pros

Support is top notch. They help you!

Cons

Haven't come across any yet...

Full Review

They have it all figured out. Good service, great prices and professionalism.

Was this review helpful to you?

You guys and gals are the greatest!!! Anytime, day or night I can count on you to get me all fixed up. I love that I can talk with a real person to clarify my troubles and invariably have a solution within minutes. I'm impressed and very happy. I'd highly recommend SiteGround to anyone. Especially those of us who are not technically inclined and would be totally lost without your expertise. Thank you very much. Best, Diana

Overall rating

10.0

Ease of Use

10.0

Speed/Uptime

10.0

Customer Support

10.0

Security/Reliability

10.0

Price

10.0

SiteGround is the BEST and wins a perfect score from me

Full Review

You guys and gals are the greatest!!! Anytime, day or night I can count on you to get me all fixed up. I love that I can talk with a real person to clarify my troubles and invariably have a solution within minutes. I'm impressed and very happy. I'd highly recommend SiteGround to anyone. Especially those of us who are not technically inclined and would be totally lost without your expertise. Thank you very much. Best, Diana

Was this review helpful to you?

Stop looking.. I spent (wasted) days.. SITEGROUND IS GREAT! I only rated 9.5 for customer support because the technical assistance COULD become 24-hour but isn't. I've been a paying customer for 3 years and through the up and downs the only downtime I had was after scheduled maintenance. The customer service has fixed all issues or had a solution to them, I tested my server with metasploit and accunetix to verify the integrity and the site was secure, and for the price you pay you get all you need to build your website. I'll never choose another web host again. I was with 3ix.com prior to Siteground and I tell ya, with the downtime, server errors/lost data, andlack of features - it may be cheap but you get what you pay for. I kind of expected the same for the siteground price. GO SITEGROUND! Don't be HostGator bait..

Great Host

Overview

HOLY SMOKES! A GREAT WEB HOST FINALLY!!!

Pros and Cons

Pros

Secure Fast Reliable Cheap, but only in cost Feature rich Fantastic support service SSH access

Cons

If you plan to do more than host a few html files (ie a video upload site similar to youtube) you need to have additional paid features (ie dedicated or cloud hosting in order to use ffmpeg). A couple times I have had surprises (hence how I got here, needed tech support). Before paying for shared hosting, make sure the plan comes with the features you need. I was disappointed that I tweaked through several hours of php and css last night only to find out today that I need to upgrade to a dedicated server :/

Full Review

Stop looking.. I spent (wasted) days.. SITEGROUND IS GREAT! I only rated 9.5 for customer support because the technical assistance COULD become 24-hour but isn't. I've been a paying customer for 3 years and through the up and downs the only downtime I had was after scheduled maintenance. The customer service has fixed all issues or had a solution to them, I tested my server with metasploit and accunetix to verify the integrity and the site was secure, and for the price you pay you get all you need to build your website. I'll never choose another web host again. I was with 3ix.com prior to Siteground and I tell ya, with the downtime, server errors/lost data, andlack of features - it may be cheap but you get what you pay for. I kind of expected the same for the siteground price. GO SITEGROUND! Don't be HostGator bait..

Was this review helpful to you?

I can say all kinds of good things about Siteground, but my best advice would be to simply try them, you'll be glad you did!

Support

Company Info

Profile

In our experience, SiteGround provides superior quality speed and uptime to their customers. We have rated them highly on this site because of their excellent performance.

Summary

SiteGround is a company that prides it self in high quality hosting. They were founded in August 2003 by a group of IT professionals.

They have almost 10 years of hosting experience and have close to 1200 servers in 3 datacenters in the US, Europe and Singapore. They have a advanced redundancy and physical security that protects your website no matter what.

SiteGround's current CEO is Tenko Nikolov. He is the visionary behind SiteGround's successful business model and technical stability.

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